Board Removes Longtime Director of Conservation Trust : Santa Monica Mountains: The action may be the result of a dispute over the group’s reluctance to pursue fund raising.

The longtime head of the Mountains Restoration Trust, a conservation group with substantial parkland holdings in the Santa Monica Mountains, has been removed by the trust’s board of directors.

Betty Wiechec, 46, the trust’s only executive director since its inception in 1981, was formally placed on administrative leave by the five-member board earlier this month. But Wiechec and others said she had been fired.

“They changed the locks,” one source said. “That’s pretty definitive.”

“She hasn’t been terminated. Who told you that?” asked Coleman Walsh, an attorney for the board.

Walsh declined comment Friday other than to deny the firing, saying it would be unfair to Wiechec to discuss her status.

Board members, facing a possible lawsuit, declined to discuss the dispute. Wiechec and board member Margot Feuer said the parties are trying to work out a settlement to avoid litigation.

Said Wiechec: “I was placed on administrative leave on Nov. 1, and I would prefer not to say any more until I see if we can settle this situation.”

The board several weeks ago told the trust’s staff of four not to discuss the matter with reporters.

Some observers involved in conservation work in the mountains, however, said Wiechec’s undoing was her long-running dispute with the board over its purported refusal to get involved in fund raising. The conflict apparently reached a head when Wiechec complained after a fund-raising auction in June about the failure of some board members to buy tickets.

According to these sources, the mostly well-to-do directors consider themselves a policy-making board. Weary of being pushed to raise money, they decided to fire Wiechec, they said.

“I think she felt so confident of her position as the unassailable leader of the organization that she could” criticize her board, one observer said.

But Mark Randall, a management consultant to nonprofit groups and former donor to the trust, said Wiechec was the victim of an “incompetent” board.

Randall said directors of nonprofit groups, like the trust, have a moral obligation to raise funds, by making contributions themselves and by putting “the arm on their business contacts.”

But this board “will not give money and will not raise money,” Randall said. “They claim it’s not their responsibility. . . . I suppose they’ve had a bellyful of her, so they decided to get rid of her.”

Randall said he himself has stopped giving to the trust. “When I found out the board doesn’t give, my attitude became, ‘If the board does not support the organization, why should you and I support it? There must be something wrong.’ ”

Another source said there were other factors in Wiechec’s dismissal, including criticism of her performance as an administrator.

Founded in 1981 as a satellite agency of the California Coastal Conservancy, the restoration trust became an independent land trust in 1985.

Although overshadowed by larger conservation agencies active in the Santa Monica Mountains, the trust owns about 900 acres there, including the 650-acre Cold Creek Canyon Preserve on Stunt Road in Calabasas. It also has helped other groups acquire parkland.

The trust also played a key role in implementing the “transfer of development credit” program, through which mountain subdividers must pay to retire development rights on undersized or environmentally sensitive lots to proceed with their own projects.

The trust obtained development credits from landowners and sold those credits to subdividers for a higher price. This income was the trust’s financial mainstay. But it dwindled with the building slump, increasing the pressure to find other funding sources.